The most important thing

I'm sitting in prison- I'm in my cell. It's dark, someone took all the light
bulbs in the cells. So, I'm sitting close to the door, so the light from the
corridor outside can allow me to see what I'm writing.

I've been here a week, but it feels longer. In Ecuadorean prisons there are no
books, no TV, no media. We go outside 5 hours a week and can have max 2 visitors
during three hours on Saturdays. The minutes pass by quite slowly. So I think
and I write.

Many years ago, a friend told me (and he has said this many times to many
people): What is the most important thing you could do? Are you doing that? If
not, why not? This has stayed with me as an important guideline. Indeed, our time is
short, we should do the most important thing.

I was born with a lot of privilege. And during my life, mostly through luck,
I've acquired even more. Let me be clear, I don't deserve privilege over anyone
else. In my opinion, no human being deserves privilege. However, I have it, so
what do I do?

One option is to ignore it and act like it doesn't exist. To me, this is an
abhorrent option. No, privilege for me means responsibility. I hate something I
don't deserve and I can't get rid of it. Thus, I have to use it for the
improvement of the world. It's really that simple. Privilege means
responsibility, power means responsibility.

Then, what is the responsible thing? Like my friend told me, logically, the most
responsible thing you can do is to work on the most important thing you could
ever do. It follows logically.

Of course, it's not as simple as that. You have to choose something where you
can have -or can acquire- the right skills. You have to choose something where
you have a chance of success. You must be able to access the right resources. All
these considerations are embedded in the original questions.

Sitting here in my cell, I ask myself the question. The same way I've asked
myself the same thing hundreds of times over the last year. Iʼm still not sure of
the answer.

Obviously I'm not very productive sitting here. But maybe me being a martyr,
kidnapped by the Ecuador government, will serve to start discussions, catch
attention and open new ways of fighting. Maybe it will serve to wake some
people up.

Of course I don't have much choice in my current situation, but I can apply the
question to my previous life and I can start thinking about what should come next.
These thoughts are taking most of my head space these days.

So, about my previous life, I decided many years ago that the field of privacy
is both something extremely important and also something where my specific
knowledge and connection would allow me to do something important. So, I've
worked on privacy enhancing tools. To me, privacy is something that is absolutely
necessary for human beings to be free and the rise of surveillance is threatening this
to the core.

My goal with CAD (and the previous iterations) of the concept was to create a group
of people with the necessary skills to push privacy forward in several different
efforts. There are so many things to work on. Both hardware and software protocols
and implementations, infrastructure and end user systems. And we were only just
getting started.

The thing about the most important thing is that it can change. When I get out,
I will have different possibilities than I had before. I don't know what that
means. Maybe there's no good way to know until I'm out. But it's still something
I'm thinking about.

I urge all of you to consider these questions. Devote your life to the most
important thing.